A 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery,” found that more than half of teachers (58 percent) polled weren’t happy with their textbooks and almost 40 percent said that their state offered little or no support for teaching about slavery.
King said there’s also the issue of what teachers themselves learned in the textbooks they read as students because “we regularly saw egregious and racist references to black people as late as the 70s.” The birth of black studies programs and the “new” social history, the popularity of Alex Haley’s Roots, and civil rights activism helped usher in curricular changes. The NAACP, for example, had a textbook committee that monitored how schoolbooks portrayed black communities and history. But sometimes, so did groups such as the Confederate Veterans of America, which released a 1932 report decrying one textbook’s portrayal of Jamestown as a raggedy settlement that didn’t compare well with New England’s early colonies.
Even if most textbooks are no longer overtly racist, it doesn’t mean pedagogy has sufficiently changed. Over the past decade, school districts around the country have come under fire for the way they teach slavery, including incorporating slavery references into math equations.
In 2012, an Atlanta elementary school posed this homework question: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week? Two weeks?” And just last year, San Antonio, Texas parents complained about a history homework assignment that asked eighth graders to list positive and negative aspects of slavery. Turns out the activity was directly tied to a textbook used by the school for about 10 years. Prentice Hall Classics: A History of the United States argued that all slaveowners were not cruel: “a few [slaves] never felt the lash,” and “many may not have even been terribly unhappy with their lot, for they knew no other.”
It’s no surprise then that, according to the SPLC report, only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed knew that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War, 12 percent understood slavery was important to the Northern economy, and just 22 percent could identify how the Constitution benefited slaveowners.
Textbooks have been a part of the culture wars for a long time, said King. In the late 1990s, scholar Leah Wasburn analyzed slavery representation’s in US history textbooks used in Indiana, and she noted how the religious right influenced textbooks in the 1980s and’90s. During this period, there were more conservative references to how Christianity got the enslaved through hard times, as well as traditional family rhetoric that said the wives of slave owners (which assumed women weren’t slaveowners themselves) took care of the enslaved in motherly ways.
King explained, “It boils down to money and politics. One of the strategies of conservative politicians is taking over state school boards, where textbook policies are been adopted.” Seats on those boards are often appointed, and large states — those who can deliver big sales to publishing companies and may require school systems to buy particular textbooks — have a massive say in what content makes its way into student’s hands and minds.
Texas, for example, earned a reputation for inserting dubious information and interpretations about the nation’s creation, evolution, and slavery into its school books. In one case, Moses — he of the Ten Commandments — was listed as a Founding Father, and enslaved people were referred to as immigrant workers in a textbook caption a student flagged in 2015. And this is a problem that transcends the Lone Star state; as a New York Review of Books analysis of the state’s curricular curation stated in this epigram: “What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas when it comes to textbooks.”